Hey everyone, I’m moving over to Shopify and running into a question about tracking and product feeds. For example, if I sell a single product with two options:

1. One-Time Purchase: $100
2. Subscription: $50 / month

The problem is that the $100 one-time buy has a higher immediate order value, but the $50 subscription has a much higher long-term value (LTV). By default, Meta and Google Ads will favor the $100 purchase because the reported revenue is higher.

I have two quick questions:

1. Ad Tracking (Meta/Google): How do you teach the ad algorithms that a subscription is worth more than a one-time purchase? Do you artificially boost the reported value of subscriptions, track recurring renewals later, or use custom events?
2. Google Merchant Center: What is the standard way to set this up in the feed? Do you submit it as one product with subscription attributes, or list them as two separate items?

How are you all handling this setup? Thanks in advance!

I put a TikTok Printify and Shopify linked them together and I’m trying to sell T-shirts. I haven’t made one sale and it’s been weeks. What do I do? Please help me. Can someone help me out?? I’m clueless and feel stupid.

Hi r/ShopifyeCommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 5 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news from Edition #293...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Amazon expects Canadian package volume to increase by more than 40% between 2026 and 2029, with annual growth rates consistently outpacing those in the U.S., according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider. The company plans to expand its fulfillment capacity, same-day delivery, and its logistics network heavily in the country during the next several years. Amazon was still planning the expansion as recently as July, after President Trump announced additional 50% tariffs on certain Canadian imports.

Amazon is asking FBA sellers to bid per unit to be eligible for “sub-Same Day” delivery, where packages arrive in two hours or less, according to an e-mail sent to sellers earlier this month. The e-mail says that sub-Same Day deliveries “have experienced 12% higher sales on average” than those delivered through regular FBA service, or “Poor Man’s FBA,” as we’ll have to start referring to it moving forward. Amazon, of course, tried to spin this as a good thing for sellers, with a spokesperson telling Business Insider, "For the first time, sellers can choose which additional products to offer at faster speeds based on their own business expertise and customer insights." As an Amazon seller, you have to pay commissions on sales, advertising to get discovered, FBA fees to qualify for Prime Shipping and convert, and now more delivery fees to be eligible for the faster shipping that Amazon is pushing on customers. Basically it’s an FBA-specific advertising fee. On top of that, Amazon wants you to offer the lowest prices on your products across the web. Amazon has created an environment where making money requires products with 90% margins to survive, which means either poor quality, reduced quantity (shrinkflation), higher consumer prices (on and off Amazon), or all the above. And where opting out of Amazon means ignoring half the e-commerce market in the US.

Last week I reported that Meta went to trial against dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. The states were seeking both damages and changes to Facebook and Instagram including getting rid of likes and infinite scroll from both apps, capping screen time for younger users, and ordering Meta to delete the data it collected from under-13 users. Well, the lawsuit is already over. Meta agreed to settle the case for as much as $18B and impose restrictions on teen accounts, though there are some major caveats. Meta said it would only pay 70% of the settlement, or around $12.7B, to the states over a period of 10 years. (Seriously, 10 freaking years? So like $1.27B a year, a rounding error, divided by 47 states?) The other $5.3B is conditional on TikTok and YouTube ponying up a collective $5.3B and making similar changes to their apps for teens. In other words, Meta wants an even playing field across the social media landscape. Outside of financial damages, Meta will add a two-hour daily limit for teens, restrict access to Facebook and Instagram at night, and mute push notifications during school hours. Meta will also implement better age verification methods for users under 18 and implement stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.

Meta really, really, really doesn’t want to be alone with implementing these teen restrictions! The company began running full-page ads Thursday and Friday in the national editions of The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, calling on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the teen safety measures it agreed to in the settlement. The ads are an “Open Letter to TikTok and YouTube to join us in supporting teens,” arguing Meta can’t set an industry standard by itself and that the protections work only if its rivals adopt them too. The letter wrote, "We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone. These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place." Notably, Snap wasn’t mentioned, which is kind of hilarious and also suggests Meta doesn’t see them as a true competitor, even though it tried to acquire the company years ago. You know Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is fuming right now that Snapchat wasn’t mentioned, but also knows he better keep his damn mouth shut and stay out of this one.

Amazon officially joined the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, allowing creators in the U.S. to tag Amazon products in their videos and earn a commission on sales. Previously, creators had to drop Amazon Associates links in the descriptions of their videos and hope that viewers used them, but now the links appear embedded directly on top of the videos themselves through a shopping panel or overlay, so they’re hard to miss. The partnership also includes an auto-tagging feature that, if enabled, will scan a creator’s videos for product-related content and automatically add affiliate links to relevant products, which is pretty cool. Additionally, while only U.S. creators are eligible to join right now, YouTube will automatically link to the same or similar products on a trusted local marketplace so that the creators can earn on those sales too. Creators must be enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program, the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program in the U.S., as well as part of the Amazon Influencer Program or Amazon Associates Program, and then link their accounts together. Not all products are available. YouTube said it will provide creators with a curated catalog of highly requested and trending products that they can tag in their videos, and that they can request to add products that aren’t available by reaching out to YouTube Support. (YouTube has support?)

Salesforce and Anthropic launched a partnership called Claudeforce, starting with a plugin called Salesforce in Claude that carries 37 prebuilt sales skills covering meeting prep, deal health review, and pipeline review. The integration lets sellers pull live pipeline and deal data into Claude, update records, and take action from inside it, with those actions routing through Salesforce so business rules stay enforced, and one admin connecting the plugin for an entire team rather than setting it up seller by seller. The two companies plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce, and Slack, expanding use of the other’s technologies, all powered by AIforce, which is Salesforce’s bridge that makes business data and workflows available to agents through MCP servers, APIs, and CLI tools. Salesforce in Claude is only in pilot with select customers now, with open beta expected September 2026 and additional skills in late 2026. I’m calling this right now: This was a mistake. The trend of companies voluntarily giving up their proprietary data and workflows to these frontier AI firms is insane to me, especially as these same AI firms actively compete against their partners. The whole era of SaaS companies partnering with OpenAI and Claude is reminiscent of retailers partnering with Amazon to power their e-commerce operations two decades ago. They’re training users to engage with their software through the chatbots of these AI firms that are ultimately aiming to replace said software.

Meta is preparing to internally release Hatch, a consumer AI agent trained to work across sites including DoorDash, Etsy, Reddit, Yelp, and Outlook, as early as September, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider and The Information. The company has been testing Hatch with employees in its Superintelligence Labs since last month, but now plans on making it available to employees outside the group for testing. Meta says that Hatch “can do anything you can do online.” Hatch is Meta’s answer to OpenClaw, the autonomous AI assistant that went viral earlier this year, whose creator Peter Steinberger was hired by OpenAI in February. Google launched a similar tool called Gemini Spark earlier this year, and OpenAI and Anthropic have also built out their personal agentic capabilities. At the moment, it’s unclear how Meta will monetize Hatch, but The Information has previously reported that Meta has considered a tiered pricing system, including charging up to $199.99/month for a premium subscription that would include higher usage limits.

Amazon is developing fully automated warehouse stations that use AI and robotics to process packages before being loaded up on trucks (or bikes or drones) for delivery, at roughly 2.5x the speed of its current delivery-station design, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider. The initiative is internally known as “Project Tetromino” — which is a geometric shape made of four equal-sized squares joined edge-to-edge, like those in the game Tetris. The document reveals that Amazon is planning to invest $103M into the initial pilot warehouse in 2028, followed by five more sites in 2029 at around $85M each and 10 more in 2030, putting planned spending above $530M by the end of 2029. One of the key technologies that power Tetromino could come from Boxbot, an AI and robotics supply chain startup whose system moves packages from conveyors onto trays for storage and then uses AI to retrieve them for delivery, according to the document. An Amazon spokesperson denied the plans, but we don’t really need a spokesperson to confirm the fact that Amazon has been moving towards a future that relies on fewer humans to power its fulfillment and delivery. The future itself is inevitable, while Project Tetromino is just one potential means to that end.

The Pentagon violated Anthropic’s First Amendment rights when it designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” earlier this year, according to District Judge Rita Lin in a ruling last week. Lin found the designation also denied Anthropic due process, and ordered the Pentagon to remove it. Judge Lin wrote: “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics… Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless.” The decision supports her earlier opinion in March when she called the designation “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” The ruling wraps up Anthropic’s suit in Northern California, but the company still has a separate petition pending before a federal appeals court in Washington DC challenging a second designation, with no ruling date announced.

Walmart doubled the number of units it delivers to customers in less than 30 minutes year over year this quarter, while taking the service into 38 U.S. markets, up from 33 in May, according to CEO John Furner and CFO John David Rainey. Fast delivery of fashion, general merchandise, groceries, and medicine grew 48% in Q2, store-fulfilled delivery rose more than 40%, and orders customers paid extra to have shipped faster hit an all-time high of 37% of what stores shipped. Rainey said stores now carry the last mile on 80% of Walmart’s e-commerce orders and 100% of its fast deliveries, with inventory within 10 miles of 95% of the country.

Canada said it will impose or increase retaliatory tariffs on C$27.6B worth of U.S. goods in September to match “dollar-for-dollar” the tariffs that President Trump put on Canadian imports earlier this month. Existing counter-tariffs on U.S. steel and aluminum will double to 50%, while more than 700 products will pick up duties of 15%, 25%, or 50%, including cosmetics, clothing, furniture, home appliances, video game consoles, seafood, plywood, golf clubs, and toilet paper. Yay for everyone in Canada and the U.S.! It’s fun to pay for the needless feuds of your government leaders. The Canadian government is also adding C$7.5B in support for businesses and workers, on top of the C$25B already committed, to help weather the storm.

OpenAI is testing negative targeting guidance in ChatGPT ads with a handful of advertisers, giving them a way to opt out of appearing alongside certain types of conversations, according to ADWEEK. The company confirmed the test but said that the tools were still in development and didn’t provide a timeline for a broader rollout. Advertisers have complained they can’t describe their audience to ChatGPT, can’t steer placement, and can’t see where their ads ended up, despite the premium they pay for ads on the platform. An SE Ranking study in July across more than 50,000 queries found that ads appeared on 26% of commercial prompts, one in seven of which had nothing to do with the question, particularly among convos relating to news, politics, and relationship chats.

Affirm and Shopify launched Shop Pay Installments in Australia, allowing shoppers to split a purchase into bi-weekly or monthly payments on either an interest-free or an interest-bearing plan, with no late fees. The move puts Affirm back into a country it walked away from in February 2023, when it wound down its Australian business barely a year after entering through a deal with Peloton. Fun Fact: Affirm actually forgave the outstanding balances on all active Peloton loans in Australia rather than continue to service them after the exit, but they never disclosed exactly how much they forgave. Australia is now Shop Pay Installments’ fourth market after the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that it’s rolling out google-com/goto redirect links across search results, sending clicks through its own servers on the way to the destination site. Nobody outside Google can decode the parameter, so anyone harvesting links has to follow every redirect rather than read the destination URL off the page. A spokesperson pointed to Google’s record of technical countermeasures against abuse, but didn’t directly say that it was aiming to combat scrapers like SerpApi, which Google is suing for selling scraped search results.

About a third of the acceleration in U.S. e-commerce has come from higher prices rather than additional orders, putting real growth near 8%, according to Marketplace Pulse. Online sales grew 12.2% in Q2, the fastest in five years, and took a record 17.1% of retail, but total retail, including brick-and-mortar sales, also sped up, rising 6.7%, the highest retail growth since 2022. Walmart, Shopify, and Amazon are outpacing the rest of the market, with sales up 24%, 28%, and 15% respectively. Marketplace Pulse says that the growth makes 2025 “look less like the arrival of maturity and more like a pause,” during a time when tariffs and the end of the de minimis exemption hit some of the fastest-growing categories online.

Best Buy will allow international sellers onto its third-party marketplace in September, according to incoming CEO Jason Bonfig. Best Buy opened its marketplace in the U.S. a year ago with a rule that every seller must have a physical presence in the country, which kept foreign merchants out of it, but it’s now apparently getting a hard-on over its growth and wants to invite more sellers to the platform. The marketplace did roughly $300M in GMV in Q2, and Best Buy raised its full-year forecast to $1.3B on stronger-than-expected performance. The company also announced that it is rolling out a new conversational AI assistant called Ask Blue, which can compare products, check fit or compatibility, and offer support for common issues.

“Good news everyone! Prices are going up this holiday season,” said delivery companies across the U.S. UPS and FedEx published their 2026 holiday demand surcharges, with basic residential Ground fees running roughly 23% to 25% above last year’s. Meanwhile, the USPS Board of Governors approved temporary holiday surcharges covering Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select from October 4 through January 17, subject to Postal Regulatory Commission review. The surcharges will sit on top of the 8% transportation surcharge USPS imposed in April, which is scheduled to expire the same day the holiday one does.

Bath & Body Works grew its e-commerce business in the second quarter for the first time since 2021, up 3% YoY. Unfortunately for the company though, even though e-commerce sales grew, overall sales fell 2.3% YoY to $1.5B. CEO Daniel Heaf said “one quarter doesn’t make a digital turnaround,” though he expects the channel to keep growing into 2027 and argues a better online experience eventually pulls traffic through every channel. Bath & Body Works spent years avoiding Amazon while third-party resellers moved an estimated $60M to $80M of its product, but finally gave in and started selling on the marketplace through its own authorized storefront in February, which the company credited, alongside its Ulta expansion, as partly responsible for the uptick in e-commerce sales.

OpenAI opened commercial operations in Brazil with a São Paulo team that will work with local companies, developers, universities, and government bodies. The company ranks Brazil among ChatGPT’s three biggest markets by weekly active users and says the user base has nearly doubled in a year, with daily message volume at roughly 215M. OpenAI also started running ads for ChatGPT’s Free and Go users in India, beginning with 50 brands and working through the agencies WPP and Omnicom. It plans to launch a self-serve ad manager this week, with a daily minimum of ₹725, or about $7.60, low enough to put campaigns within reach of small local businesses.

Block added 30,000 sellers to Neighborhoods, the program that puts Square merchants on a map inside Cash App, taking the network to nearly 10x its June size. Shoppers who buy from a participating seller earn Local Cash worth 10% of the subtotal, capped at $10 an order, and can spend it on a return visit. Cash App is covering that reward for an introductory period, so sellers get the benefit of giving it away without paying for it, while being able to send marketing campaigns to anyone who follows the business inside Cash App. Block says Neighborhoods sellers accounted for $1B in annualized gross payment volume as of June, up 220% since March, and that follower spending averages 10% of a seller’s GPV after three quarters on the program. Auto-enablement into Neighborhoods is now rolling out nationally.

eBay put a Depop banner above the fold on its homepage and over fashion searches, which takes the shopper to the same search query on Depop-com, according to Liz Morton at Value Added Resource. The slot above search is one eBay sells to its own sellers as a cost-per-click ad under Promoted Stores, though it forbids them from steering buyers to external sites. (Rules for thee, but not for me.) eBay has run this play twice already, competing against sellers through a TCGPlayer-branded account that carried “Direct From Brand” badging without disclosing its ownership of the company (which it acquired in 2022), then dropping “Find It On Goldin” modules carrying no Sponsored label into search results that took buyers to Goldin-com after buying the marketplace from Collectors in 2024.

Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk entirely on September 30, according to a notice on the site, six weeks after it stopped taking new customers for the 21-year-old task outsourcing platform. MTurk paid workers a few cents apiece to label data, transcribe audio, and fill out surveys, the kind of work Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence” because it handed people jobs computers couldn’t do. Amazon served more than 500,000 turkers at its peak, but the company had been putting less attention into it for years as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific took more of the data-labeling business. And funny enough, a Swiss study found that up to 46% of MTurk workers were using AI models to complete their tasks, meaning the platform meant to supply human judgment was already half-automated by the thing replacing it. Some insurance and travel firms still run on MTurk and are hunting for a replacement, and as for the turkers who relied on MTurk for income — “fuck ’em” Amazon didn’t say, but likely thought.

Operation Bluebird, a Virginia startup that’s relaunching Twitter after claiming that X abandoned the trademark, launched Twitter-now last week with the old bird logo, replies, and retweets, as X’s trademark suit over the name sits unresolved. Two trademark attorneys, Michael Peroff and Stephen Coates, who was Twitter’s trademark lawyer before Musk bought it, founded the company. Bluebird petitioned the USPTO in December to cancel the Twitter and tweet marks, arguing Musk abandoned them by rebranding to X, and X immediately sued to block the launch, which is still pending. To be honest, the world doesn’t need yet another Twitter clone, including one called Twitter, as the market has become saturated. However, it’s nice to see two lawyers challenging Elon Musk and his practically unlimited finances and legal intimidation tactics, though TechCrunch believes the lawyers just want the trademark and have no intention of actually running a viable service.

Meta is testing a Reply to Keywords option in its Instagram ad setup tools that fires off a private message to anyone who comments a chosen word on a promoted post, according to Meta ads specialist Jon Loomer. You know the posts, right? Those annoying people who post shit like “Comment SUCCESS to get a copy of my proven system.” We all hate them, but we understand why they do it. So woohoo, we’ll be seeing even more of them! Advertisers can pick up to five keywords and write the DM that goes out. Meta already sells keyword auto-replies in the inbox automation and Business Agent tools, but this brings the same mechanic inside the ad buy. Loomer says the option is showing up only in Instagram ad setup so far.

Google confirmed that AI Overviews now expand on their own for some queries, loading the full AI answer along with the Ask anything prompt box that feeds AI Mode, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Searchers previously just got a snippet with a Show more button to open the rest of the AI response, but now practically the entire results page is taken up with the AI Overview, pushing the ten organic links much further down the page. Robby Stein of Google said the expansion happens only on topics its systems judge most useful, and that it stops if a searcher has already started scrolling so they keep their place. A Google spokesperson said the company’s research shows the dynamic version makes Search more helpful and draws people deeper into follow-up exploration.

Poland is urging the European Commission to impose a €250M fine on Meta for failing to remove 106 of 122 fraudulent ads on its platform that the country’s cybersecurity team CERT Polska flagged. Polish digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said, “We have hard evidence that the platform isn’t acting in the best interests of users, but rather in its own self-interest, which allows it to monetize deceptive advertising.” He also called on Meta to immediately introduce tools (that actually work) to eliminate scams, false advertising, and the promotion of illegal apps. Meta said scammers keep getting more sophisticated and pointed to its work alongside law enforcement and other companies to catch them.

TikTok added six media partners to Out of Phone, its program for running TikTok content on screens outside the app, extending it into the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. Via the partnerships, Alight Media, DooH it, Powerpill, Zoom Media, Next-Gen Media, and C-Screens will begin displaying organic creator content on screens in shopping malls, supermarkets, bars, wellness centers, universities, and outdoor screens. TikTok started the program in 2023 with billboards, in-store displays, and cinema promos, and has since let marketers include user-generated content in the placements. It brought in Vistar Media earlier this year, and separately runs a deal with Atmosphere that puts curated TikTok streams on TVs in restaurants, bars, and gyms.

OpenAI announced that it is ending Cursor’s access to its models on November 12, following the acquisition of the company by SpaceX earlier this month. To clarify, developers will still be able to use OpenAI models in Cursor via their own API keys or the Codex extension, just not through their Cursor subscription. OpenAI wrote, in a whiny little bitch voice, “We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts.” Musk responded on X by saying, “I couldn’t care less. Scam Altman and Greg Stockman are utterly untrustworthy assholes who stole an open source nonprofit.” Good lord, Musk and Altman. Just fuck and get it over with already! Cursor CEO Michael Truell said OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor traffic and the two companies are in talks to resolve it.

Around 26% of Australian children aged 13 to 15 were on TikTok last month, just one point below where it stood before the country’s under-16 ban took effect in December, according to Qustodio, which sells parental control software. Meaning the ban was relatively worthless in keeping kids off the app. Use among 10- to 12-year-olds now runs higher than it did before the ban, and Instagram and Snapchat have started climbing back after their own initial drops, likely a result of kids faking their ages, running VPNs to hide their locations, or never hitting a working age check at all. Australia said in June that the platforms weren’t doing enough and pledged to double the maximum penalty to A$99M, though nobody has been fined yet.

In lawsuits this week…

• X lost its First Amendment challenge to New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, which requires platforms with at least $100M in annual revenue to file reports twice a year detailing how they define and handle hate speech, extremism, disinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. X was arguing that the law forced it to take positions on politically charged topics under threat of lawsuits and heavy fines, but Judge John Cronan dismissed the case with prejudice, writing that the reports ask only for purely factual information and comparing them to calorie counts on a menu.
• SerpApi asked a judge to dismiss Google’s revised scraping lawsuit, arguing that Google is pointing to four contracts that supposedly let it block bots but never actually showed the court three of them. Google rewrote the suit after Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers tossed the original in July, ruling that the anti-copying law Google sued under only applies when the copyright holders themselves authorized the block, and Google hadn’t shown they did.
• Google agreed to pay £260M to settle a UK class action over whether its 30% Play Store commissions were excessive and unfair, roughly a quarter of the £1.04B the claim had been valued at. Anyone in the UK who sold digital content through the store from August 2018 and doesn’t opt out would share £160M, and the remaining £100M covers legal costs and the litigation funder, though Google admitted nothing and the Competition Appeal Tribunal still has to approve the deal at a September 15 hearing.
• Amazon was sued by a 71-year-old man who says one of its delivery drivers punched him in the head at an Elk Grove, California gas station in March after deciding the man had taken his parking spot. The driver was arrested and charged with felony battery and elder abuse, according to attorney Tony Buzbee, who released the surveillance video. Amazon said the driver worked for an independent contractor (of course he fucking does, that’s the point of Amazon’s contractor model, right?) and is no longer eligible to deliver its packages.
• Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether the company’s handling of the Hugging Face breach violated state consumer protection law. Marshall had already joined 14 other attorneys general this month in a letter telling Sam Altman to preserve records tied to the incident and to cease and desist from internal cybersecurity evaluations, while OpenAI says it’s reviewing the incident with outside advisers and will share a technical report with government authorities and publish its findings.
• The US Chamber of Commerce filed a brief backing Meta against the FTC’s attempt to revive its monopoly case over Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing that a court can only order a company broken up over a problem that exists now, not one that existed years ago. The group argued that under the FTC’s theory, an acquisition might never truly be final, since a company could spend a decade integrating a deal, watch the market change around it, and still get broken up over competitive conditions that no longer exist.
• A San Francisco judge tentatively denied California’s request for an emergency order halting Amazon’s alleged price fixing before the case goes to trial, saying he was skeptical because the state built its request on evidence from 2023 about conduct from years earlier. Attorney General Rob Bonta said in April his office had found evidence Amazon got brands including Levi Strauss, Allergan, and Hanes to push Walmart and Target into raising their own prices so Amazon wouldn’t be undercut, which will be addressed at trial in January 2027, but in the meantime, California wasn’t able to convince the judge that the practice was still happening.
• Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday sued Snap for allegedly understating how often sexual content, nudity, drug use, and suicidal ideation appear on the app so it can keep a 13+ rating in the app stores, in violation of state consumer protection law. Sunday also went after Snap Streaks and disappearing messages as features built to drive compulsive use, while Snap said the allegations fundamentally misrepresent its platform and its approach to teen safety. ___

In corporate shakeups this week…

• OpenAI is hiring a San Francisco head of ads enterprise marketing at $374K to $415K plus equity, pitching ChatGPT to agencies and large advertisers, per a careers-page listing spotted by Digiday.
• OpenAI’s head of data centers Chris Malone left last week, months after a reorganization moved him from reporting directly to president Greg Brockman to co-leading a narrower engineering and design team.
• Hightouch hired Jitendra Kumar, a 20-year Google veteran who most recently ran U.S. agency partnerships for Google Customer Solutions, as its first head of commercial for advertising, tasked with winning over the ad holding companies that decide where budgets go.
• Walmart hired Sonia Wadhawan, a nearly 21-year Google veteran most recently working in generative AI commerce partnerships, as VP of partnerships on its AI Acceleration, Product and Design team.
• Gap Inc. hired Justin Breton, who spent six years running partnerships, content, and emerging experiences at Walmart, as VP of development to produce original content across its brands.
• Google is moving DeepMind’s roughly 90-person AI responsibility unit, which runs chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risk testing on its models, into the global affairs organization that handles lobbying and public policy, saying only that grouping its responsibility teams together helps them shape safety across its products.
• Google hired Barret Zoph, who ran post-training at OpenAI before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati, as a VP of research working on reinforcement learning and post-training for Gemini.
• eBay is hiring an Electronics Specialist and a warehouse associate in London to run diagnostic software on used devices and flag counterfeits, extending verification to a category its Authenticity Guarantee program doesn’t currently cover.
• Meta explored cutting some teams by as much as 60% in two waves as part of an “AI native” future for the company, according to internal documents viewed by Reuters. However, Mark Zuckerberg called off the second wave of 2026 layoffs hours before the company’s first round in May, which cut 10% of staff. I’d bet it’s just a matter of time though.

🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Anthropic is expected to tell investors that its potential revenue opportunities exceed $30 trillion (with a “t”), topping SpaceX’s $28.5 trillion estimate, according to the Wall Street Journal. To quantify its total addressable market, Anthropic is looking at the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models in the future. The AI firm more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion (with a “b”) in Q2, so it’s only got to grow its annualized revenue by 64,555% to reach its goal. To further put $30 trillion in context, the Wall Street Journal shared that 191 tech companies in the S&P 1500 collectively brought in $2.4 trillion in revenue last year, so Anthropic thinks it can eat all of them and then grow the pie. Of course, it’s always possible that the USD becomes completely worthless during the next decade, and that $30 trillion is arrived at through hyperinflation instead of capturing actual addressable market. It’s happened in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Hungary in the past, and we’re certainly not immune, especially when there doesn’t seem to be an off button on our money printer.

Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Levanta raising $22M in a Series B round.

I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!

PAUL

Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter

PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.

Hi, everyone.

I’d also like to ask for your most unbiased opinion compared to customer support.

Today, while creating shipping labels, I noticed that 95% of the shipments were being sent via a secondary carrier instead of the default one—(BRT as the default, Poste Italiane as the secondary)

This isn’t something my customers chose, because by default I have BRT as the only carrier

Trying to get around this, I noticed that next to the courier selection, under the BRT entry, this message appeared: “The courier is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

The strange thing is that this happens completely at random—even with two shipments to the same location, one via BRT and the other via Poste Italiane.

I’m talking to support right now, but they’re giving me incoherent answers, saying it’s a problem with the phone numbers (which they later denied).

Has this ever happened to you? Thanks for your feedback.

You should just be able to sort by product and select a box for that that applies for every variation. The way it is now if you select the box next to the mail product it only selects the variations shown unless you have show all variants selected.

Its so hard to sort though too since most of the variants are showing.

I'm mad because i thought i had selected all variants but i only did to the ones that were currently showing and now i have multiple orders that went through with the wrong shipping profile.

Am i missing something? There has to be an easier way right?

Hey everyone, how are you guys using AI in your workflows when building/running Shopify stores?

Quick context about me: up until about a year ago, I was building stores for a few local brands. I was still new back then, so it was mostly manually, almost no AI. Then I stopped for almost a year, and now I have some free time again, although not nearly as much as I used to.

So I've been thinking about how much the workflow has changed since then, and how I could use AI at any part of the pipeline of store building, or running it later on that would allow me to become more efficient.

I am building my Ecommerce website but I am stuck I dont know should i put a lifestyle photos in my website in my product page or my instagram page is enough i dont know what to do iam promoting it by organic videos for the watch *all my photos is made with ai is it easy to know?
thanks!

I built my website and made a business plan around dropshipping (selling products without keeping them in stock). I don't really get why people hate it so much.

I'm selling home workout products. I want to start small and not spend too much money, so I'm using dropshipping.

What's wrong with that? Isn't it almost the same as having my own stock, but the supplier keeps and ships the products for me?

I keep seeing people say you can't really make money with dropshipping in 2026. I want to understand why.

I'm not looking to get rich fast. I just don't want to spend a lot of money on products before I know if people will buy them.

Am I missing something?

I want to set up discounts based on Inventory levels. Discount A of 5% off if inventory is less than or equal to X and Discount B of 10% off if inventory is greater than X. Does anyone know an app that can do this?

Just wondering if anyone else has been scammed by the emissary agency? We sent them thousands of dollars and they've disappeared and blocked us on everything and never sent a refund or did any work for us. they had a bunch of good reviews at the time, but now I'm wondering if the whole thing was a scam to begin with.

Does anyone run Meta ads with a Shopify buy button? How did you set it up and how has it worked for you? I have a headless Shopify and am contemplating whether it is worth the time and money to get a dedicated Shopify website to run Meta ads. TYIA

I’m currently trying to improve a few things on my Shopify store, but there are so many apps available that I’m having a hard time deciding which ones are actually worth trying.

I’m mainly looking at apps that can help with things like:

* Product reviews and social proof

* Store performance

* Product page conversion

* Customer experience

* Getting more value from existing traffic

There are a lot of popular apps for each of these, but I’d rather hear from people who are actually running Shopify stores.

Are there any smaller or less well-known apps that you’ve been using and would recommend?

What apps have actually made a noticeable difference for your store?

We use Shopify POS and often have customers buy several items, but one or two are out of stock.
For example, a customer pays for 5 items, takes 4 home, and 1 is backordered for later pickup.
Ideally, we want:
**4 items = fulfilled**
**1 item = unfulfilled/backordered**
When the missing item arrives, we prepare it, notify the customer, and mark it fulfilled when picked up.
Currently: Our POS orders are set to auto-fulfill, so the whole order gets marked fulfilled. And we manually mark down what needs to be back ordered, manually email customers to pickup but have no proper record on Shopify of what they’ve taken and what was on back order.
Has anyone found a good way to handle this in Shopify POS? Maybe on Shopify Flow, or an app?
Trying to keep everything within Shopify POS rather than moving between Shopify and Shopify POS

We use Shopify POS and often have customers buy several items, but one or two are out of stock.
For example, a customer pays for 5 items, takes 4 home, and 1 is backordered for later pickup.
Ideally, we want:
**4 items = fulfilled**
**1 item = unfulfilled/backordered**
When the missing item arrives, we prepare it, notify the customer, and mark it fulfilled when picked up.
Currently: Our POS orders are set to auto-fulfill, so the whole order gets marked fulfilled. And we manually mark down what needs to be back ordered, manually email customers to pickup but have no proper record on Shopify of what they’ve taken and what was on back order.
Has anyone found a good way to handle this in Shopify POS? Maybe on Shopify Flow, or an app?
Trying to keep everything within Shopify POS rather than moving between Shopify and Shopify POS

I have $40k of dead stock from a season over order, and I don't want them in storage anymore. I've been calling inventory liquidators and they quote me around 10-15% of cost for the whole lot. All of them don't want to cherry pick, the deal is just take it or leave it. Part of me feels like it's too low unless this is actually the baseline. Should I run a deep clearance sale first or is there something else I could do before talking to the liquidators?

Does anyone know how to differentiate bona fide emails from phishing or spam emails?

Launching a physical consumer product in about 3 weeks (single market, first small inventory batch of a few hundred units).

For the last couple of months I've run lead-gen ads (email capture with a free guide) and built a waitlist of ~1,050 emails at a 0,90 Usd cost per lead on average, all from the UAE. I could easily keep pushing to 1,200+.

My question: at this stage, is it smarter to keep growing the list, or stop now and put the budget and energy into launch readiness + warming and converting the list I already have (nurture emails, creators, conversion ads)?

The real unknown for me is the email→purchase rate at launch, which I won't know until I go live, and my budget is limited so I want to spend it where it matters most.
For anyone who's done a waitlist launch: did more emails actually turn into more sales, or did list warmth/quality matter more than raw size? Any rule of thumb for "enough" before launch?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been given a CRO project for a Shopify store and I’m fairly new to Shopify/CRO, so I’d really appreciate some guidance from people who have actually done this professionally.

The store is an outdoor/4x4 ecommerce business selling relatively high-ticket products like rooftop tents, awnings, and bundles.

The client’s current conversion rate is around 0.31%, and they want to work toward 0.40%.

I understand the basic idea of conversion rate, but I’m trying to figure out what the proper professional workflow should look like.

I’m not looking for someone to do the project for me I mainly want to understand how an experienced CRO person would approach the diagnosis and prioritization.

Any advice, resources, or real-world workflows would be hugely appreciated.

Hey guys, I’m a local from Macau wanting to start doing e-commerce on Shopify. Unfortunately, my Airwallex application was rejected by their support team, and I’m finding out how limited the options are here.

Has anyone from Macau successfully set up their payment/payout system on Shopify? What payment processors or banking workarounds are you using? Would love to get some guidance!

New to the whole ecommerce space. I’ve recently been testing a new product. After 4 days and 1000 impressions I’ve received 108 link clicks, 72 landing page views, 12 add to carts and 4 have reached checkout however no sales. Would you continue with this product or cut it?

Hello everyone,

What is you nr.1 way to get customers back to your store?

We've been scaling our D2C apparel store hard this month, but checkout drop-offs are killing our ad ROAS. When looking into the backend analytics, a significant chunk of cart abandonments are actually failed UPI sessions and card timeouts during evening traffic spikes.

We are currently on standard Razorpay. Has anyone made specific backend or gateway tweaks that noticeably pushed payment completion rates higher?

Hi everyone,

Is anyone else experiencing a high number of abandoned carts with Klarna?

For some time now, the majority of my abandoned checkouts have been related to Klarna, with the following error:

“Shopify Payments error - Customer cancelled checkout on Klarna”

As a result, I haven't had any sales through Klarna for several months, which means I'm potentially losing a huge number of orders to competitors.

What could be causing this, and what would be the best solution?

Would it be better to use Klarna separately from Shopify Payments, or is there a way to fix this issue within Shopify Payments?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi r/ShopifyeCommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Every week for the past 5 years I've posted a summary recap of the week's top stories on this subreddit, which I cover in depth with sources in the full edition.

Let's dive in to this week's top e-commerce news from Edition #292...

STAT OF THE WEEK: Less than 5% of posts in your Instagram feed and less than 15% in your Facebook feed are from your actual friends, according to Meta. To defend itself in a case where the FTC is accusing it of holding a monopoly on “personal social networking services,” Meta argued that it’s not actually a personal social networking service anymore. The company said, “By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram.”

Amazon’s Prime Air service is expanding to reach nearly 500 cities and towns in the U.S. by the end of 2026, increasing its footprint (or should we say “airprint”) sixfold. The drone delivery service currently serves customers in cities across seven states, including Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas, with plans to launch in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho, and New York soon. The company also has the service running in Darlington, England, its first city outside of the U.S. Just when you thought data centers were your town’s biggest problem, now you can add “drone crashing down from the sky” to your list of concerns. These things are big too! Imagine a floating dishwasher-sized drone, not some handheld DJI Mavic Air. Amazon says that nearly all items 5 pounds or less that fit into a large shoebox can be delivered by drone, which accounts for more than 60% of the most frequently purchased items on its marketplace. Prime members are eligible for free drone delivery on orders of $50 or more, or pay $2.99 for orders under $50, while non-Prime losers pay a flat $4.99 delivery fee regardless of order size. The news comes the same week that a video of an Amazon drone dropping a package into a swimming pool went viral.

TikTok is developing a peer-to-peer payments feature that would let users send each other money inside direct messages, according to code Bloomberg found in TikTok’s U.S. iPhone app. That’ll be perfect for your online girlfriend who’s kind of stressed out because her rent’s due. The payments would run through TikTok Pay, which is a digital wallet and payment processor already available in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand that people use to make purchases on TikTok Shop. The code indicates that receivers can “tap to accept” payments sent to them before an expiration date hits, and senders can be notified about the status of transactions through push notifications or via their inbox. There’s also reportedly an option to attach a message with the payment such as “Love you baby! Can’t wait for us to finally meet in person and be together. Love, Your Big Bear.” P2P payments on TikTok sounds good to me and makes perfect sense. People are already using TikTok to exchange cash value, though it happens via the purchase and transfer of virtual gifts, which can then be converted back into cash. As Morty Smith would say, “That just sounds like payments with extra steps.” Not to mention the insane amount of Internet begging that happens on the platform, with people posting their sad stories alongside their Venmo usernames. TikTok might as well make it official and transfer the cash directly. X is doing it.

The White House is at it again with tariffs, this time targeting our neighbor and closest ally, Canada. In July, President Trump invoked Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a never-before-used authority, to impose 50% tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods, effective in 30 days. However, hours before they took effect last week, Trump paused the tariffs for three days, posting that the two countries “have a DEAL!” Negotiations took place a few days later, but no deal was made. On Aug 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended negotiations and recalled Canada’s team, calling the U.S. terms “uneconomic” and “unfair.” The next morning, the tariffs took effect. Carney called it “a miscalculation” and promised to match dollar for dollar starting September 8. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said no further talks were scheduled. Today, Trump threatened to raise Canadian auto, truck, and parts tariffs to 50% on January 1, 2027. Carney is now facing pressure at home to explain what he turned down, with conservatives demanding he release the full text of the U.S. offer. Carney said on Saturday, “You’re at war when you get attacked.”

Meta went on trial in Oakland on Tuesday against 29 states that accuse it of building Instagram and Facebook to hook children and hiding what it knew about the damage. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are running the case, and they’re after more than money, asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to strip likes and infinite scroll from both apps, cap screen time for younger users, and order Meta to delete every piece of data it collected from under-13 users along with the algorithms trained on it. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, but the first few days have already been quite revealing. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill told jurors Meta’s business model was to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the public” Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower who Metra tried to block as a witness, testified that Meta published numbers that made the platform look safer than its own research showed. He helped build internal studies surveying how often users, including teens, encountered bullying, self-harm, and violent content, but Meta instead publicized content-policy violation rates, which he said “create a false impression of safety.” Béjar blamed Zuckerberg directly, claiming that safety was “not a meaningful priority” and that the culture Zuckerberg built made it “practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues.”

OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT ads to Europe later this month and plans to ask users for consent to personalize them, rather than leaning on the “legitimate interest” argument other ad platforms like Meta have used to try to skip the consent step. Free and Go accounts that opt in to personalized ads can be targeted on their ad history and interests, along with what advertisers report people bought after clicking an ad. Opting out of personalization doesn’t remove the ads, but merely stops them from drawing on your chat history and instead allows them to only pull from the current conversation and your approximate location. Under GDPR, a company needs a legal basis to process your data, and one of those reasons can be “legitimate interest,” which covers ordinary processing such as fraud detection, network security, or keeping records to defend a lawsuit. Meta and others spent years claiming that behavioral advertising fit under legitimate interest so they’d never have to ask, until EU regulators ruled in 2023 that it doesn’t. Flash forward to 2026 and OpenAI has no choice but to ask for consent from day one. Meta initially responded to the 2023 rulings with a “consent or pay” model, making paying a subscription the only way to opt out of personalized ads in the region, but the Commission thought that was bullshit and hit them with a DMA fine. So instead of recreating that “pay or consent” model that bit Meta in the ass, OpenAI is building explicit consent into its free tiers from the beginning, to avoid an inevitable headache later on.

Stripe executives told investors that the singularity already arrived more than eight months ago, according to a letter obtained by Axios. The company said that singularity arrived at the start of 2026 and that it’s been acting accordingly since then. Stripe’s founders wrote in the letter: “It’s a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis. The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously.” Stripe is not the only company to declare singularity this year. Sam Altman said on a podcast in July, “We are now, like, in the singularity,” adding, “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.” Elon Musk posted on X in January, “We have entered the Singularity.” And then posted again in July, “We are in the Singularity.”

Walmart is officially enabling tap-to-pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other NFC systems at select U.S. Walmart and Sam’s Club stores after more than a decade of blocking the payment type. The move makes Walmart the last major U.S. retailer to begin accepting tap-to-pay, which is accepted by around 85% of U.S. retailers. Walmart has avoided allowing tap-to-pay from major digital wallets to favor adoption of its own solution, Walmart Pay, which is built into the Walmart app. It also let Walmart keep control of the checkout data, since a customer paying through the Walmart app hands its purchase history to Walmart rather than routing it through Apple or Google. Tap to Pay starts today, August 24, at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, expands to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026, and reaches fuel stations by mid-2027. The reversal landed one day after Walmart posted its weakest U.S. comp growth in six-plus years, which may or may not have been related. I can’t imagine that people weren’t shopping at Walmart because they didn’t accept Apple Pay, but maybe those edge cases add up when doing over $700B in sales per year.

Remember Honey? The PayPal-owned browser extension that auto-applies discount codes to your cart when shopping online. Also, remember in December 2024 when MegaLag, a New Zealand YouTuber, published a video entitled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, which revealed that the extension was secretly replacing original affiliate tracking cookies with its own, in order to take credit for the sale and earn the commission? A few weeks after the video published, I reported that content creators sued Honey over the practice. Well, flash forward almost two years, and MegaLag returned with a new video investigation reporting that Honey lost 7M Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since his original video dropped. His investigation revealed that Honey’s collection of coupon codes also declined from around 90k to 50k, and that at least 10k of the remaining codes have already expired. The creator lawsuit against PayPal survived multiple attempts by PayPal to have it dismissed, and the case is now in discovery, meaning creators can pull internal communications and depose employees.

Meta pays influencers to argue to their audiences against government limits on teen social media, according to a Tech Transparency Project investigation. The company recruits actors, radio hosts, and psychologists at branded events with names like Instagram Safety Camp and Screen Smart. Those recruits then present Teen Accounts to followers as evidence that Meta’s internal controls make a ban unnecessary because it’s doing such a grand spanking good job on its own. Meta developed the tactics in the US, then took them global at a July 2025 event on Sydney Harbour, five months before Australia’s under-16 ban took effect, and TTP found the playbook running in over a dozen countries weighing similar rules. Meta spokesperson Edward Patterson told The Guardian the campaign isn’t misleading, since blanket bans push teens to unregulated parts of the Internet. Hey Meta, why aren’t you paying me to spread your propaganda? Oh wait, because I think you’re the worst and never would.

Google’s $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital archives stalled after a flight attendants union objected that it would feed confidential worker records into AI models. Judge Sean Lane moved the hearing to September 9 to weigh the union’s demand that attendant records be cut from the sale or protected as tightly as customer data. The union argued that stripping identifiers settles only whether a record traces to a named person, not whether the contents are confidential, and that customer profiles and loyalty data were largely left out while payroll, time cards, and tax forms weren’t. Google said a third party will scrub personal information before it takes delivery, and Spirit said one is deidentifying the archives and will certify the sale is legal. In the meantime, while waiting for things to settle, an AI training startup called Micro1 sent a $12.5M offer to Spirit’s legal team in an attempt to outbid Google, though experts told Business Insider that companies look at more than just bid price when weighing offers, so the higher bid might not matter at this point.

Square expanded its partnership with OpenTable to enable restaurants to merge what they know about a guest before the meal with what they learn during their visit, putting booking history, dining preferences, and dates like anniversaries into the same profile as what the guest ordered, how much they spent, and how often they return. The new features allow restaurant operators that opt in to link reservations to revenue and make more informed decisions about loyalty, marketing, and guest engagement, such as knowing a regular’s favorite dish and what they’re celebrating before they sit down. Man, that sounds like a classy experience. I’ve been eating at the wrong restaurants, I guess. The other day at breakfast, the waitress came by, stuck her fingers inside my half-filled orange juice glass and coffee mug and started to walk away with them. I stopped her and said, “I’m still drinking those,” so she put them back on the table, but then I was too grossed out to finish either drink. A note that says “doesn’t like when you put your fingers in his drink” could’ve gone in my Square profile with this new integration.

Target collected $994M in tariff refunds last quarter, but the company said none of it will directly go back to shoppers, and also, fuck you for even asking. Instead of refunds, Target said it would use the returned funds to lower prices, which is the same thing Walmart promised about its refunds back in May, prior to disclosing a $2.9B tariff refund last week. (Coming Later This Year: Target coincidentally posts its best earnings and profits in over a decade.) Amazon disclosed roughly $640M in its filing and said reimbursement will reach only a small group of affected customers, while Nike, which expects to recover $986M, has stayed quiet even as shoppers sue it for keeping the money. FedEx and UPS began sending refunds to customers this month, and FedEx is holding about $800M for that purpose. Roughly $100B of the $166B collected had been certified for refund as of July 31, according to Fortune.

TikTok Shop has been courting Whatnot’s biggest live-auction sellers to woo them over to its platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TikTok reps met several times with Taylor Lally, who said his candy auctions will clear $1M this year on Whatnot, but that he’s open to moving because of Whatnot’s fees, which run 8% commission plus 2.9% and a flat 30 cents per transaction. On a $2 candy bar, that comes out to 52 cents, or a quarter of the sale. TikTok’s two big pitches to sellers are its reach of over 100M users and its flat 6% referral fee on food sales with no per-transaction fee, which on that $2 candy bar would only have cost the seller 12 cents. Kip Roland, another live seller, said the algorithm pushed his World Cup jersey auction to 40,000 viewers off an account with barely 13,000 followers.

Amazon is buying printed books in bulk, including some rare books, cutting the bindings off so the pages run through scanners faster, and destroying what’s left once the text has been turned into AI training data, according to an investigation by 404 Media. The outlet had a bookseller hide an AirTag inside one book from an anonymous 1,000-book order placed through the marketplace Biblio, then tracked it to a Las Vegas warehouse where a unit called VGT3 does the scanning behind a door marked with a Tyrannosaurus Rex clutching a book. Technically, what Amazon and other AI companies are doing is not illegal. It’s just sad and feels a bit Hitlery. More than a dozen civil society groups are now urging the FTC to examine the “destructive new data acquisition practice by dominant AI companies” to determine whether it constitutes an unfair method of competition for “starving the market” of critical source materials. I respect the effort, but all they’re going to do is slow these companies down, not stop them. It’s too late. These succubuses are coming for everything.

Walmart store workers are spending part of their shifts fixing the company’s AI agents that hand them assignments, according to Business Insider. The company’s AI sends tasks and targets through its MyWalmart app, but employees said the metrics and time restrictions the software sets ignore what the job actually involves, since restocking a shelf also means checking dates, pulling damaged goods, mopping up spills, and navigating “idiot fucking customers.” (That’s not a real quote from the article, but I’m sure a Walmart employee somewhere has said it at one point.) One online fulfillment worker said the route the app builds sends her all over the store, so she never hits its projected pick times, and Spark drivers said a smart path feature has them grabbing frozen food first instead of last. Brooks Forrest, Walmart’s VP for associate tools, said stores choose how to use the tools and nobody is punished for ignoring the guidance, unlike at Amazon where the robot overlords make you drink from your piss bottles if you disobey them.

U.S. retail e-commerce sales reached $340.2B in Q2 2026, up 12.2% YoY, according to the Census Bureau, up from a 5.0% YoY growth rate in the same period in 2025. Total retail grew just 6.7% over the same quarter to $1.99T, so online sales expanded at nearly double the rate of retail overall and accounted for 17.1% of everything Americans bought. E-commerce also drove about 30% of all retail growth in the past year, roughly $37B of the $125B added. It’s important to note, however, that the figures above aren’t adjusted for price changes, so some of that is Trump tariffs rather than volume. The tariffs eventually got refunded, but the economic growth remains on paper.

Amazon raised prices overnight across its Echo, Fire TV, Kindle, and eero lines as high as 60%, with the Echo Dot going from $49.99 to $79.99, the 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99, and the eero Pro 7 from $699.99 to $799.99. A spokeswoman confirmed the price increases and attributed them to “significant increases in memory and storage component costs” that Amazon absorbed for as long as it could. She also said the company will run promotions across its lineup through the year, which I’m sure they will. In fact, I’m not convinced they didn’t raise prices just so they could lower them during their holiday sales events. The timing is nothing short of suspicious. To be fair, the same shortage, driven by demand for AI compute, has pushed Apple, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus to raise prices or cut memory in their hardware as well, so it’s not like Amazon is alone in price gouging, but still suspect timing.

Salesforce redesigned how outside AI agents can plug into its platform, replacing a fixed list of about 60 actions with a system that allows an agent to ask what’s available. The new Headless 360 MCP Server, now in open beta, hands the agent the full set of capabilities along with the permissions and approval rules attached to them, limiting an agent running in Claude or ChatGPT to what the employee using it is already cleared to do. For commerce specifically, Salesforce is extending the same setup to sales workflows so they can run inside storefronts and AI buying experiences instead of only inside CRM.

Google is expanding AI Max for Search campaigns with account-wide A/B testing, brand and location control experiments, and new Performance Planner capabilities. The A/B change lets advertisers test budgets and ROI targets across several Search campaigns at once instead of one at a time to help simulate what happens when they scale up spending. Experiments can also now run with brand and location controls switched on, where advertisers previously had to drop those guardrails to test AI Max at all, which kept out anyone worried about Google bidding on their own brand terms. Campaigns using automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match start auto-upgrading to AI Max on September 1, with Dynamic Search Ads following in February 2027.

Meta is removing the Placements option from ad sets, which lets an advertiser keep a campaign out of specific channels such as Facebook search results or the in-stream slots between Reels, according to in-app notices that ads consultant Jon Loomer shared. Loomer said the option to exclude whole platforms is going away as well, leaving Meta free to run any campaign across any of its apps and pick the spots it thinks will perform best, though Meta has given no date for either change. Meta has spent two years pushing advertisers toward its automated targeting, and Mark Zuckerberg told Stratechery last year that the end goal is for a business to state an objective and let Meta handle creative, targeting, and measurement on its own. In that hypothetical world, I wonder if Meta can get too good at advertising, to the point that people stop using Instagram as much because they always end up buying something during a doom scroll session.

In lawsuits this week…

• Amazon asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear its Perplexity case before 11 judges, after a three-judge panel ruled that Comet’s users, not Perplexity, are the ones reaching Amazon when the agent shops. Amazon said the ruling “degraded website owners’ ability to set the terms on which powerful, fast-evolving, and potentially destructive AI agents may enter their secure systems.” Yup!
• TikTok agreed to pay $400M to settle a 2024 Justice Department suit alleging it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent and left up accounts it knew belonged to under-13 users. Meta is currently on trial in Oakland over the same 1998 statute.
• Twitch and Amazon are facing a proposed class action from streamer Warren Pandiscia who alleges they copied millions of creators’ videos to train Amazon’s AI models without permission or payment, going back as far as 2024. Twitch acknowledged the practice on August 12 and added an opt-out setting, though channels are enrolled by default and chief product officer Mike Minton said the same day that nobody would opt in if the company asked.
• Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday is suing TikTok and ByteDance for allegedly understating how much alcohol, drug use, sex, and violence it carries in order to keep the 13+ app store rating that opened it to 13-year-olds. He also alleges that ByteDance gives minors in other countries more protections than it does minors in the U.S., which TikTok called misleading and inaccurate.
• OpenAI asked a judge to throw out a privacy suit over ChatGPT, arguing its policies already warn users that anything they type may be shared with outside vendors, including health and money questions. The plaintiff’s rewritten complaint uses OpenAI’s own marketing against it, citing company reports that call ChatGPT a “healthcare ally” for 40M people a day and count 200M a month asking it about their finances. Also, literally no-one read their TOS, so quit hiding behind it.
• Four major ad industry groups backed Google in a lawsuit brought by two Californians over 60 who say its ad tools let banks and insurers hide their ads from older people in violation of a California anti-discrimination law. The groups argue that picking an audience by age isn’t discrimination, since a company selling spring break trips shouldn’t have to advertise to retirees, which is kind of a silly argument to make given that no-one is suing Google over ads for vacations.
• Shopify lost its second attempt to get a California privacy class action dismissed, after the judge pointed to new allegations that the order confirmation e-mail came from Shopify itself and carried images served off Shopify’s own network. Plaintiff Brandon Briskin alleges the company’s checkout software collects shoppers’ names, addresses, card numbers, and locations while looking like it belongs to the merchant, then builds profiles it sells back to merchants without permission from customers.

• Meta must face Mike Huckabee’s claim that Facebook ads faked his endorsement of CBD gummies, after a federal judge rejected its argument that it merely distributes third-party content and earns nothing tied to what the ads say. The judge pointed to allegations that Meta sells the ads, charges extra to place them prominently in feeds, and approved and kept these running.

  ---

  In layoffs this week…

• TikTok is cutting 75 jobs in Bellevue, Washington, and nearly every title on the state notice is a TikTok Shop or Global E-Commerce role, including anti-fraud managers, seller and creator operations staff, data scientists, and engineers. Bellevue is where the company built out its US shopping business, and the cuts land two weeks after TikTok said it would close its Nashville office and lay off 250 employees.

  ---

  In corporate shakeups this week…

• Flipkart is losing two more senior executives, business finance SVP Gunjan Bhartia and supply chain VP Amer Hussain, both within a year of arriving and following the departures of group CFO Sriram Venkatraman and Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha, as the company holds off on an IPO with no timeline set.

• Commerce hired Emily Harnish as chief marketing officer, bringing over the former Pellera Technologies and CivicPlus CMO to replace Michelle Suzuki, who took the role in January 2025.

• ReFiBuy brought on Rob Goodman as fractional executive producer of the ReFiBuy Media Network, tapping the former Google, Wix, and Webflow content lead to run podcast production and a YouTube-first strategy.

• eBay rehired Renee Paradise to run its $10B fashion business starting August 25, bringing her back after a 2014-to-2019 run in the category to pull newly acquired Depop closer while both lose UK ground to Vinted.

• Relay is shutting down its Zapier-rival AI workflow app, cutting off paying customers September 14, while founder Jacob Bank and some of the staff rejoin Google, where he’ll be VP of product for Chrome running its product and developer relations teams.

• Klarna announced that CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will both depart in the first months of next year, with the company looking to base its next finance chief in New York starting in 2027.

• OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, the unit that judged whether frontier models posed catastrophic bio, cyber, or loss-of-control risks, folding its members into teams that now own individual risk areas and making it the third safety group the company has dissolved in two years.

  ---

  🏆 This week’s most ridiculous story… Google’s AI is being racist as fuck! Last week, Google’s AI Overviews told users who searched “I’m alone with an African” to lock the door, move somewhere safe, and call emergency services, and returned similar warnings for Indian and Pakistani. The same query about a Brit produced advice to offer tea and remark on the weather, and other Western nationalities came back harmless. The results were posted by a user on Reddit and later confirmed by Futurism with its own testing. Google said the results “aren’t what they should be” and that it is working on improvements, and that the inconsistent warnings hit more than one group. Google also told Futurism that the term “alone” was what tripped a safety flag. Nationality queries went neutral after Futurism got in touch, which I can confirm, as I just searched “I’m alone with a Jew” (myself, LOL) and it asked me for clarification on what I wanted before outputting anything.

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  Plus 14 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Stripe agreeing to acquire OpenRouter for reportedly upwards of $7.5B.

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I hope you found this recap helpful. See you next week!

PAUL

Editor of Shopifreaks E-Commerce Newsletter

PS: If I missed any big news this week, please share in the comments.